It’s certainly been a while since I last updated my blog, but I have some exciting news! 😀

I participated in Ludum Dare 17 last weekend and had a blast making a game based around the theme “islands”. The result? “Island Rescue”, a fun twist on the good ol’ falling blocks game where players must balance the clearing of lines with the survival of a friendly villager who faces grave danger at the hands of the ever-rising tide. Whew, that’s a mouthful.

I was poking around on the internet, and to my surprise, I stumbled upon a very old review that I wrote. For a Commodore 64 game released in 1990, developed by Domark, called Badlands.
I thought it was pretty funny, not just because I happened to be only 13 years old when I wrote it, but apparently the review is dated December 25th. I guess I spent some time on Christmas Day reviewing Commodore 64 games. Crazy.

Here’s the review:

This game is great!! It’s racing mixed with weapons, and the ability to upgrade both your car and your weapons makes this game one of the best ones I’ve played so far. The control takes some getting used to, and the system that it uses for upgrading is a little hard to understand, but those are minor problems compared to the fun you can have with this one! If you only get one C64 game, make it this one.

If you’re curious, the review can still be found at the Area64 website (look for Badlands in the Games section)

You might have noticed that I changed and customized my WordPress theme to something a little less dark. I think it’s pretty nice, and I might do some more customizations later. Woo!

Oh, almost forgot. About a month ago I updated my merge.py script so it actually works now (a new release of pygame broke the previous version of the script) and supports vertically merging images. A handy tool, indeed!

Click to make the image bigger (and much more readable)
Hooray! See my last post for more information about this. It’s from Linux Format Magazine, issue 108. Huge thanks to Mike Saunders for this scan.